Weight loss after pregnancy

Change the Way You Eat

Eat, enjoy, be healthy and happy

Huggies’ own registered nutritionist and author of the latest sensation, the anti-diet book Change the Way You Eat, Leanne Cooper, is often asked, ‘why do I find it so hard to stick to a diet?’ ‘Why is nothing working?’ Of course there is no one simple answer. “We do know that dieting simply doesn’t work. If it was going to, I think we would have seen some signs over the past 30 years” Leanne suggests.

Yes, girls (and guys), it’s time to stop beating yourself up about food, because that might be just the very thing making it hard to eat healthy!

Often when we think about managing the food we eat, we think in terms of counting calories, tallying points or measuring our waistline. But why, if we know what’s good for us do we find ourselves repeatedly falling over at the same ‘diet’ hurdles?

What’s wrong with the way we eat?

One of the many issues with the way we eat today is an over emphasis on food as numbers: calories of this, points for that, grams of on the other. Reducing eating to number crunching can in many cases simply be a distraction and at the same time be an obstacle to eating a healthy diet. Aren’t most diets these days simply rehashes of the same old tired diets we have tried ad nauseam over the past 30 years, just re-wrapped to make them look new and appealing? We know that dieting over the long term just doesn’t work. Surely it’s time we stood up and said, ‘enough is enough’!

Can end in harmful outcomes related to poor self-esteem, poor body image and negative emotional states.

Food shouldn’t be a reward and even less a punisher. Why do we demonise food when it’s us who chose what we eat and how much? Maybe it’s our way of admonishing ourselves from responsibility. Maybe we want a quick fix, even if there is no evidence it will ever work. Maybe it’s a useful money making opportunity. Maybe it’s ‘D, all of the above’.

If you watch a toddler (up to about two), they innately know when they have had enough to eat. Research confirms that little ones can effectively regulate their intake to meet their needs over a 24-hour period. So what goes wrong? What changes? We should be able to enjoy food while implicitly knowing how much we need and when we have had enough, as well as enjoying wholesome foods while not having to spend too much effort on restriction and restraint. Clearly there are a lot of influences over-riding our once good eating habits. But how can we get back to where we started, to where we should be?

“The capacity for us to self-regulate dieting is one of the many behaviours that appears to dilute over time.”

Restraining yourself can work against you

We try so hard and for so long to stick to our diets, to say ‘no’ to those foods that beg us to eat them, in the end often it feels like our willpower lets us down? But, is willpower really to blame or something else? In fact, the effort required to control ourselves is often unsustainable; the stricter we are the harder we make it for ourselves. Studies show that the very effort that goes into restraint leaves us depleted and vulnerable to poor choices, just like hunger does. Hunger and over-restriction are not our friends. The sheer strength of our dietary habits is rarely acknowledged. Automatic behaviours are extremely strong, so strong we may not be aware of them. It takes considerable effort to overcome habits that are so ingrained they are automatic.

“It seems those of us who find we barely notice we are overeating accessible, inexpensive, palatable food regularly are likely to gain weight because each of these variables encourages the intake of energy. So far studies suggest that in these situations the sheer pleasure and enjoyment from a meal overrides our desire to control our weight. We could be forgiven for feeling like the cards are stacked against us, but what we need to be aware of is that restriction isn’t necessarily the best route to success.”

So, what can be done?

Strategy 1

“Hunger and bad food choices are ‘joined at the hip’, so avoiding hunger while still being tuned into your body signals will go a long way in helping you stick with healthy eating options.”

What should we be focusing on?

We need a diet that is individual for our needs and rich in a variety of unprocessed foods, one that is sustainable for all and nourishes the body and soul. Simple…
We know from studies on longevity that Mediterranean diets such as those in Sardinia (Italy) and the traditional Japanese diet in Okinawa, Japan, appear to yield a long and healthy life. You won’t see rhetoric about calories or points, nothing about low-fat this and that, or restriction, punishing or avoidance. The focus instead is not just on produce, legumes, complex carbs and fish but also on enjoyment. A new move away from diets is the non-diet approach to healthy eating (refer Linda Bacon, Health At Every Size (HAES)). The non-diet approach shifts our focus from eating for body shape to nourishing our bodies for health.

“Remember, we are trying to override old behaviours with new, reshaped ones. You can see that simply ceasing to eat all foods you love but feel you shouldn’t eat might not be the best route for success. In fact, doing this can for some simply be the beginning of failure. After all, how long can you keep it up if you really don’t enjoy your new diet? Some refer to this as inhibition eating, where we try to inhibit the desire to eat a certain food. Research tends to suggest that as a form of restriction it is not effective over the long term”.

Focus on an acceptance of and respect for the enormous variation in natural body shapes and sizes. Be open to flexibility in eating with an enjoyment to match, while being in tune with hunger cues and feelings of fullness (satiety) and enjoying healthy movement.

Strategy 2

“It takes roughly twenty minutes for the process of satiety to occur. In other words, it takes twenty minutes from the time you start eating to the time your body signals to your brain that you are full. Avoid judging your level of fullness or huger within twenty minutes of a meal; if you decide just 10 minutes after your first helping that you need more, the answer will likely be a resounding ‘yes’.”

Healthy eating and the way to sustained healthy eating habits involves:

Being in-tune with body cues and eating in line with hunger and fullness, shifting from eating without thought which overrides these important internal cues

A focus on food quality over what not to eat, reflecting on healthfulness and individuality

An enjoyment of nourishment and movement

It’s a ‘big picture’ diet if you have to name it as a diet. It’s eating for nourishment and enjoyment not body image and punishment.

Now it’s taken a good few years for us to get to where we are and unlearning, then reshaping behaviours is not a simple task. There will be some degree of resistance; that’s normal, and it won’t happen overnight – ask any psychologist. But with mindfulness, you will see changes and these will motivate you to keep going. You’ll find just as you can mindlessly overeat unhealthy options, you can with time mindlessly eat well. Without giving it too much effort, it will become second nature again.

Strategy 3

“…become more aware of how long it takes to become noticeably hungry, how long before you begin to be uncomfortable, or when you can’t take your mind off food through to when you begin to exhibit actual signs of hunger such as shaking and nausea. Also become aware of what it feels like to be comfortably full and then consider how it feels to be overfull. Perhaps this includes ranging from feeling as if your abdomen is so stretched you need to loosen your pants, to feeling as if your stomach is so full it could almost make its way back up your oesophagus.”

Before you start eating ask yourself, ‘how hungry am I on a scale of 1-10 (one being extremely hungry)? When you have finished your serving and at the end of the 20 minutes wait, ask yourself, ‘how full am I a scale of 1-10 (one being extremely full)?’ Use this to assess how much you expect to eat and if you think you should eat again. Use this as your focus and not the appeal of the food staring at you.

Don’t get me wrong, the non-diet approach is no body weight panacea, it won’t result in you significantly altering your body, but it will help you to have better eating habits, a healthier life and feel a whole lot better about yourself and your eating patterns.

Won’t it be a joy to find it easy to eat healthy options, to be less swayed by unhealthy choices, to unconsciously make healthier choices and actually enjoy eating? Plus you can even have treats and won’t feel the need to beat yourself up over them.

Strategy tips

There are a bunch of tips interspersed throughout this tip sheet, it’s important to remember to avoid taking on the world. Taking on too much can be a recipe for disaster. Other strategies you might like to take on include could be:

Using smaller plates for meals

Avoiding using large serving utensils

Moving the unhealthy food options to the back of the pantry and fridge and bring the healthy foods to the front (though even better swap the unhealthy options for healthy ones and don’t have the temptation in the house)

Not letting the wait staff clear your table so you can keep a visual track of how much you have eaten

Sitting at the table furthest from the buffet

When dishing up, plate food low and flat, avoid mounds

Leave a small amount of food on your plate to avoid it being refilled

Understand the triggers that make you want to eat when you don’t need to and think of ways to avoid them

Changing habits is not easy, so have a clear vision of what you want to achieve, understand the small steps involved in getting there, ensure all of these are positive. Choose simple strategies; big, clever sounding strategies can simply be overwhelming and underachieving. Start with one strategy and focus on this for a month. They say it takes about a month to rewire your neural pathways to override an old habit and form a new one. You could liken it to the path ants wear into a tree trunk, the hundreds of hours it took to create this path and the time required to wipe it away is just as mindboggling. Healthy eating is problem solving focused, not punishment focused, always positive and flexible.

Strategy 4

A simple way to improve your eating is to focus on variety. Variety of food groups, variety of colour. So many of us eat ‘yellow’. Pasta, apples, milk, cereal, bread and so on…sound familiar? This is even more so for our children. While there is variety in the food groups, increasing the variety of colour is an easy way to improve the nutrient diversity in your diet. So a berry smoothie, wholemeal bread, lentil moussaka and so on.

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